How Not to Kill a Vampire

A short story

Photo by Naseem Buras on Unsplash

Dublin University requires that a scientific paper follow a specific format—title, authors and affiliation, abstract, introduction, methods, results, conclusions, acknowledgments, and references—but what’s the point when nobody’s alive to read the paper?

Elisa Harris
November 22, 2024

Title

Do Ultraviolet Flashlights Kill Vampires?

Authors

Elisa Harris 
Colin O’Donnell (deceased)
Margaret Byrne (no longer human)

Abstract

While it’s long been known that sunlight is fatal to vampires, we don’t know why. In our study, we set out to determine whether ultraviolet light, one of sunlight’s components, is the ingredient that destroys these monsters of the dark. And if so, can we use that information to create an anti-vampire weapon?

Introduction

The vampire invasion began on November 11, 2024, when a pair of American teenagers wandered away from their guided tour of Pădure Castle outside the village of Bistrița, wending their way to a sub-sub basement through a series of undiscovered twisty passages that the castle’s builders had closed soon after the structure’s completion in 1413. 

“The guide bored me,” Ethan Grossman, seventeen, told police after he went missing for twenty hours.

“The castle tour was duller than trig class,” his friend, Peter Ansorge, said to a Jurnalul Național reporter at the time. “My parents gave me night-vision goggles for my birthday, so I thought it would be fun to try them out in unlit parts of the castle. We didn’t think we’d get lost, you know, because I had the goggles, and Ethan had been an Eagle Scout.”

The Jurnalul Național article reported that the teens’ escapades led to the discovery of a massive chamber beneath Pădure Castle filled with over two hundred helter-skelter coffins. 

“This is exciting,” Adina Gheata, the castle’s historian, said at the time.

A vampire slept in each of those coffins. Stimulated by the close proximity of noise, vibration, and human scent, the vampires rose for the first time in six centuries. 

A week later, in a second interview, Gheata said, “This is terrifying.” 

The vampires were bulletproof. Nothing stopped them, not garlic or any herb or drug, not knives, swords, crosses, stakes, bazookas, or RPGs. 

“We’ll nuke the monsters,” Annie Petris said during her campaign for president of the United States. “We will vaporize every last one of them with tactical nukes, city-busters, whatever it takes.” True to her promise, President Petris ordered a nuclear strike on Arkadelphia, Arkansas, which was overrun with vampires. The missile, launched by an F-35, erased the town, but whether it killed vampires remained an open question.

From time to time, people reported success in repelling and killing vampires with ultraviolet flashlights. Amazon, H&M, Costco, and retailers worldwide sold out of UV flashlights. 

Newspaper columnists and television commentators speculated that UV flashlights had no effect on vampires, that this was a ploy to get people to buy worthless gadgets. 

Methods

I’m writing as fast as I can. Longhand now, because the vampires killed the staff at the power plant.  

Howls of preternatural hunger and rage fill the air. Once they breach the hallway, the lab’s feeble lock and furniture I pushed against the door won’t hold them long.

We captured twelve vampires, secured them in titanium cages provided by the Dublin Zoo, and experimented with different ultraviolet light combinations. An ordinary Eveready flashlight served as our control. 

Results

“Eureka!” Margaret said after she destroyed a vampire with a 305 nanometers ultraviolet beam. She then shone the light on two more vampires, both bursting into bright orange flames before vaporizing into shoe-sized piles of ash. 

We saved humanity. We celebrated with an extended group hug.

When our hug was over, I turned to the cages. Margaret had left the light trained on a fourth vampire. Though bathed in ultraviolet light, the vampire was unharmed. 

Did we miss something? Did we misinterpret the results? 

We stood, mouths agape. 

What’s wrong? I thought. My elation collapsed into despair. 

Nobody said a word for a full minute until Colin spoke. 

“The vampire evolved an immunity, just like some bacteria become impervious to antibiotics. While the Sun is a blend of lights, our UV beam is narrowly tuned, which enabled the vampire to develop resistance to all other wavelengths. I don’t know how that happened so quickly, but everything about vampires is enigmatic.” He pointed to the UV generator, a silver cylindrical flashlight-shaped tube attached to a digital output meter that measured power and frequency. “We’re getting close, but we need more tests before we have a working anti-vampire defense. Perhaps a combination of 305 nanometers and another UV frequency will thwart the vampire’s UV resistance, in the same fashion we deploy multiple antibiotics against Mycobacterium tuberculosis.”

For Colin, the war metaphor was apt for all of biology. He wasn’t wrong. 

Margaret walked to the cage for a better look, but she hovered too close. The vampire shot its arm through the bars, wrapping its hand around her neck. Margaret's eyes went wide, and her face turned blue. 

“Release me or she dies,” it growled. “Now!”

Its breath was a wave of sulfur. Glass equipment shook as if on the verge of shattering. 

I froze. 

Colin unlocked the cage. 

The vampire flung the door open with incredible force, hurtling Colin across the room with such speed that the surrounding air whistled. He crashed into the centrifuge, broke his neck, and died instantly. 

The creature shoved Margaret to the floor, straddled her, and drank her blood until her red hair turned white. Then it hissed at me and fled. 

The next morning at 11 a.m., the vampire that escaped our lab killed ten patrons at the Temple Bar Pub. The following day, two more daytime vampires rained death on Dublin. Then another and another all across Ireland. 

A week later, the first reports of daytime vampires arrived from across the pond. The mutated genes spread among vampires like autumn leaves in a windstorm. 

I did that. I created the first vampire immune to the sun’s rays, and now that they all are, there’s no safe place for humans. 

Conclusions

We’re screwed. 

Acknowledgments

University of Dublin Department of Biology
Dublin Zoo

References

Darwin, Charles, Origin of the Species, 1859
Malcolm, Ian, Life Finds a Way, 1993
Sandu, Nadia, East European Legends and Monsters, 2023

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If you enjoyed How Not to Kill a Vampire, I think you’ll also like my story, Bobby Severn's Flashlight.